


Heart to Heart

by Leonawriter



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Friendship, M/M, Nobodies and Somebodies - freeform, Post-Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance, Pre-Kingdom Hearts III
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 18:24:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15418914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leonawriter/pseuds/Leonawriter
Summary: Realising you were in love with your best friend was usually bad enough. Lea felt like he had it ten times worse, and ten years too late.





	Heart to Heart

Roxas had asked him what love was, once. Sitting on top of that clock tower, eating ice cream. 

He’d tried to explain, and it’d been _awkward._  

Now, Lea winced at the remembered words of _you need a heart, man_ , the way he’d been so sure, right up until he _died_ , that he hadn’t had one, telling Roxas he couldn't do something like love because he had _no idea-_

_Maybe,_  he found himself thinking now, _kid should’ve asked someone who got turned into a Nobody when they weren’t a damn kid._

Not that most of the rest of the Organisation would’ve been that much better, for one reason or another. But then, maybe at least anyone else would’ve had a better idea of how to explain things, how to-

How to _not just find our you’ve been in love with your best friend for the past ten odd years only after you realise you’ve lost them._

Light, he was such an _idiot._

“You’ve got that face on again. That one that says you’re beating yourself up for something Axel did. Anything you want to talk about?”

Lea groaned, and opened his eyes just enough to see Kairi looking down at him.

“Nah. I mean, it’s not all that important.”

He closed his eyes again, and tried to forget, tried to put it out of mind for at least a _while._ But of course that just had the opposite reaction, and his heart chose just then to remind him of-

_If I can make everyone remember me, I’ll be immortal_

_You’ve changed_

_(Nothing, because there wasn’t anything there behind Isa’s eyes anymore, nothing left of Isa)_

_-_ just how much it _hurt._

“It... doesn’t look like it’s that unimportant to me,” Kairi says, sitting down next to him. 

“I...” he sighs. “I just keep forgetting how much having a heart hurts. Like, looking back, I remember feeling things like this _sometimes_ , y’know? When things were happening with Roxas, and... well, things got wild for a time. But I could always tell myself back then that it wasn’t really real. And now...”

There was no safety cushion. No deniability. It was real, and what he was feeling was stronger than he’d ever felt as Axel, stronger than anything since the last time he was Lea, when he was a _kid._

_“_ A heart hurts to tell us what we have to do. If it didn’t hurt, we wouldn't know there was anything that needed fixing, would we?”

He put a hand up in front of his face, and then let it drop, right above his eyes.

“How...” he was tempted not to say anything after all, to brush it off again, but how could he hope to figure any of this out on his own? “How d’you figure out when you don’t just love someone as a friend?”

“Huh? This... is this about...”

Lea tried not to make his smile too bitter, and he isn’t sure how good he is at it. He’s had over ten years of playing the part of having the right emotion on his face, but now when he needs it, his heart seems to just wear itself on his sleeve, whether he likes it or not.

“Yeah. Isa.”

Like always nowadays, Isa’s name comes out roughly. Like it’s an old wound.

In many ways, it is. It’s why his heart is bleeding like crazy, after all.

“We’ll get him back,” Kairi says. He has to lift his arm away from his face and open his eyes to see the expression of determination she’s wearing, the belief in her eyes. “Just like we’ll get everyone else back, too. Don’t forget, everyone'll be right behind you, because we all want the same thing. Never stop believing that you can, and when it matters most, his heart will know the way back home.”

Axel had cried. Sometimes - rarely. Often in the heat of the moment, probably, so he’d hardly even know because his flames would’ve evaporated them in short order.

Lea didn’t know if the tears that were building up were from relief, or... because finally, he could accept what he was feeling, and there was just so _much_  of it.


End file.
